SEO Link Building to Increase Web Traffic

Building backlinks is a necessary way to better your website’s SEO and organic rankings. It’s absolutely essential for a website to have backlinks and a backlink strategy in order to boost your online reputation and visibility.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website. When a website features a link to another website, it’s called a backlink. Search engines use the number of backlinks to a website as a factor in determining that website’s ranking. So, if there are a lot of links to your website from other sites, your website will potentially rank higher than a website with fewer links.

Building backlinks should be part of your SEO strategy – that is, it should be ongoing and you will not see results overnight. However, with a good backlink building strategy, you’ll see results in your rankings.

What are Backlinks?

There are types of backlinking, each of which will affect your SEO and ranking differently. Knowing the different options for backlinking can help you decide which is best for your website. Depending on your backlink strategy, you can either link to your homepage or to ‘deep’ pages (more specific pages on your site). Links can contain your brand or company name, or the keywords that you’re targeting.

Natural Linking

Natural linking is exactly what it sounds like – other users find your content online and link to it on their own website of their own accord. This takes no extra effort on your part. All you have to do is create engaging and interesting content that people are willing to link to!

Outreach Linking

This one takes a bit more effort. For outreach linking, you have to contact bloggers, directories, or other websites to request that your content be featured there and linked. This takes a lot of time and effort, as you need to communicate with webmasters and content writers who get dozens of these requests every day. Your content has to stand out for them to want to feature it on their website.

Self-Created Linking

This refers to you posting your links on another website. This can be through comments on blogs, social profiles, or independent directories. These links are of the lowest value to search engines, although can still help with your SEO. Do it too often or across too many websites, and you may look like spam and even get penalized by search engines.

Important to note is that search engines will take into account how many links are on a webpage. If there are a lot of links on one website, that is less legitimate that if there are only a few links. This is another reason why something like self-created linking in blog comments is less effective – there are likely dozens of other people linking their own websites as well.

How to Build Backlinks

The best way to build backlinks is to build a company blog that is useful, interesting, and engaging. This way, people will be motivated to share your content on their own. You can share your blog on social media and ask followers there to share as well. If you are relevant and newsworthy in your industry, you will get more natural shares and links that will contribute well to your SEO.

Determine what keywords and search terms you want to rank for. Then, do your best to have your link featured on websites that also rank for that word. Using relevant search terms and keywords will help the backlinks boost your SEO for those keywords on your website as well.

If you build backlinks correctly, you’ll see a slow trend upwards in your rankings. Your visitors won’t immediately spike up, and you won’t zoom to the number 1 spot. Just like any aspect of SEO, building backlinks is a process that will take some time. Keep this in mind when you’re setting your goals for your backlinking campaign.

What to Avoid when You Want to Build Backlinks

Do a quick Google search and you’ll see there are many options for buying backlinks. This will put links to your website across different sites to help build your backlinks more quickly. However, this falls under black hat SEO tactics, meaning if (or, when) search engines catch on, your website could be penalized.

At VivosWeb, we always use and recommend white-hat SEO methods for link building. If you want to incorporate backlinks into your SEO strategy, contact us today.

VivosWeb is a full service digital marketing agency located in the heart of Hamilton, ON. Our professional marketing team has significant experience developing websites for all markets and at a variety of price points.